On the Waterfront

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Talk story about Matteo Pericoli's "Manhattan Unfurled." [NOTE: A detail from this artwork, a line drawing of Manhattan’s West Side skyline, is reproduced throughout the talk section. The drawing will be exhibited at NYU’s Casa Italiana until Dec. 24th.] Pericoli, a thirty-one-year-old Italian-born architect who works for Richard Meier, draws obsessively. He draws buildings, he draws maps, he draws birds. And last year he drew all of Manhattan... He did it on a single, thirty-seven-foot-long roll of white paper. He started the drawing in May of 1998, working nights and weekends. Until he finished, a year later, he kept the paper rolled up on a table in his apartment, on the Upper West Side, exposing only a few feet at a time. He would draw six or seven blocks, then roll the paper forward, covering what he had just done. He worked like the scribes who write Torah scrolls by hand: he never erased, he never changed anything once he had done it, and he never looked back at his work after he finished a section... “I saw all of these wonderful buildings on Riverside Drive that have such character, and I wanted to draw them,” he said. “At first, I thought I would only do a drawing of Riverside Drive. Then one day I decided to go on the Circle Line, and it was a revelation to me. It is the most democratic view—what you see is what you get.”... In all, he took more than four hundred photographs before he was ready to start drawing...